A while back Toni moved into this ranch-type house, and part of one of the garage had been sectioned off into a laundry room, so naturally the other part of the garage needed to become the new Build Space. Having finally found some free time and help, it was time to check a few things off the house's Inspection Report and while we're at it, get ready for building for Franklin 2013! Hit Back after viewing an image.

So here's the starting point - clutter and siding! The inspector said we should really have 5/8" Type-X fire retardant sheetrock, so that's going to be put in. When Toni bought the house. the contents of the garage came with it, which included some cool stuff like a ride-on mower, but also included piles of wood, as the previous owner was a builder and cabinet maker. The number of doors stacked up in here is amazing.

After some effort went into de-cluttering, we have some space to work with. The lathe was also moved out, and the trailer hitch that came with the garage was scooted out of the way.

And so begins some demolition! Removing the siding from the walls was a relatively easy process. The wiring seems decent, although we're going to have to remove that 220V extension cable wired into the junction box.

More siding removal - you can see where the door to the garage used to be - now you go through the laundry room to get out there. Thanks go to Luis for helping out with his expertise, and for replacing the floor boards down there.

Future source of juice for Milly - Luis is wiring in a 220V outlet in place of the extension cord - much neater, and safer to boot.

And the sheet-rocking has begun. It's easily 95°+, and we have a fan, but it's not much use when the garage door has to be closed to get at the top of the sheets.

A fair bit of effort later and we have most of these two walls done - to finish it up we just need a few extra pieces to fill in the gaps.

Et voila! The sheet rock for the Build Space is done, but there's still a bit more hanging to go, around the corner and the house-facing wall of the laundry room.

Luis got busy taping and floating while Toni cleaned up some of the debris - it's going to be a full trash can this week!

A bit more effort, and we have the remaining sheet rock up - phew! We also hung panels in the eaves to seal off the attic space.

With the taping and floating done, we dragged the old mat out and carried on cleaning up the debris.

And here's the raw space ... next step is to paint the sheet rock and get some furniture in there.

Oops! We stacked too many doors and sheets of sheet rock against the table saw, and it buckled under the weight. Drat.

Does the paint look familiar? :-)

All the cutting in is done, so next we break out the roller and fill in the rest - a gallon was exactly the right amount of paint as it turned out ...

... and the camera actually got the colour right in this photo :-) Fortunately when it all dried it didn't look quite as streaky as it does in this pic.

On to furniture - we want a workbench and a worktable too. Here's some 3/4" melamine we're going to use for the workbench top - as it stands it's a bit low ;-) so we need to cut up some legs.

As the tablesaw is out of commission, we turned to the circular saw, and started chopping up 2x4s for the legs of the bench and table.

Well within Team Radicus standard tolerances!

Actually once we sorted them by length, it wasn't too bad - we can use the four shortest for the table, and arrange the rest for the bench to deal with the slight slope on the concrete floor.

This may not be the absolute best way to go about this, but it seemed to work. Brackets were screwed into some half-inch MDF, and the legs are screwed to the brackets.

Part one of the bench is dropped into place, and we need to screw the top on.

Came out pretty well - there is a little wobble to it, but it's certainly tolerable, and we'll screw it to both the wall and the second part of the bench, which will stabilize it.

And part two of the bench is done. With the whole thing screwed together, it seems pretty sturdy.

The last piece of the puzzle is the worktable, which will be 4'x4'. Here you can see the fan we've been using - it can certainly move some air - thanks to Melanie for loaning it to us!

For just a bit more stability we used the scrap from the shorter bench and screwed it to the ends of the benches.

Using the same construction technique as the bench, the table came together fast. We made it a little shorter than the bench, so it'll be a nice height for marathon tapping sessions :-)

We had a couple of packages of the anti-fatigue matting sitting around, and they fit nicely between the table and the workbench.

Cool ... the first items in our attempt to get re-equipped have shown up: two iCharger 106B+ battery chargers! Thanks to Pete Smith of Team Rolling Thunder for the product suggestion. Unfortunately we haven't ordered power supplies yet ... Hit Back after viewing an image.

Welcome back to www.teamradicus.com! We're pleased to be back online, but more pleased to be back into combat robotics, and looking forward to our first event in six years: NERC's Motorama 2011 in Harrisburg, PA. This site will record our design, build, test, and competiton efforts as we return to the hobby, and learn new things on the way to rebuilding our fleet of robots.